Rollbacks on the range

Cattle are herded in the Grand Staircase-Escalante
National Monument, a battleground for grazing rights

JEFFREY D ALLRED, DESERET MORNING NEWS

NATION

To help
public-lands ranchers and "preserve open space," the Bureau of Land
Management (BLM) plans to revise its nine-year-old grazing
regulations. Some say those changes will let cattlemen ride
roughshod over public lands.

In 1995, President
Clinton’s Interior secretary, Bruce Babbitt, overhauled the
rules that control ranching on public lands (HCN, 04/17/95: Back to
grazing reform … maybe). But in December, President
Bush’s Interior secretary, Gale Norton, proposed a rule that
undoes those reforms, giving ranchers more rights.

Under
the proposed rule, permit holders will have part ownership of any
fences or wells they install. If they’re asked to remove more
than 10 percent of their cattle, they have 5 years to comply. The
BLM can’t act to improve damaged rangeland until it does
extensive monitoring. And range managers no longer need to seek
public input for most grazing decisions.

"We think the
changes are a win for all public-lands users," says Brenda Richards
of the Idaho Cattlemen’s Association. But environmentalists
say the new rule will damage rangeland. Under Babbitt’s
rules, ranchers who violated a federal law, such as the Endangered
Species Act, on any public land would not only face prosecution,
they’d also lose their grazing permits. If the new rules go
into effect, they’ll lose permits only if they break the law
on their own allotments. "It’ll be like getting your license
revoked on the street on which you were caught driving drunk, but
being able to drive on any other street," says Randy Moorman,
legislative research assistant for Earthjustice.

The
public comment period ends March 2. For more information:
http://www.blm.gov/nhp/news/releases/pages/2004/pr040102_grazing.htm.